Tag Archives: snow leopard

Today, Apple will present several new products to its third party developer community…and through the tremendous press scrunity — not to mention what Steve Jobs recently called (an undesirable) “nation of bloggers” (ahem) — by extension the larger world of its users, enthusiasts and curious potential ‘switchers.’

Some of them will be software, some will be hardware, but most if not all will likely manage to attract their own little cyclonic orbits of controversy.

Here are some of the grapevine’s expectations; stay with us over the week ahead for post-event analysis and fresh dirt on what’s next from Infinite Loop. Read more

A new test build of Mac OS X 10.6.3 has been seeded to developers, with known issues listed as “none.” This typically means that the build is a final test seed and barring major surprises, can be expected to be released in a matter of days. Read more

Since its original release, the Most affordable Mac ever has found work in unexpected places; being stuffed under the seat in a car, performing as a media center, and even taking on jobs as a server platform. It is power efficient, small and easy to manage, all qualities that make it well suited for use in alternate roles.

Now Apple appears to be catering to these special use cases, today they released a new Mac Mini specifically targeted for use as a server. The new model includes a full unlimited copy of Snow Leopard Server for $999. In contrast to Apples other hardware, there is only one configuration of the Server Mini at this time; a 2.53Ghz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, the same Geforce 9400M found in the standard Mini, and 2 – 5400rpm, 500GB hard drives as stock. Read more

With the release of Snow Leopard only a short time ago, many of Apples internal applications, save for a few such as iTunes and Front Row, have been rewritten in Cocoa and built as 64-bit applications. The reasons for doing so range from reluctance to retrofit major new features or fix old bugs in an application due for a Cocoa overhaul, to the obvious advantages that come with 64-bit computing; access to larger amounts of memory should it ever become necessary, and new processor features only available in 64-bit mode.

While Apple is no doubt still working on porting their flagship application to 64-bit Cocoa, the release version of iTunes 9 available from the Apple Website is apparently still 32-bit only. Read more

As “iTablet” (Macbook Touch? iPhone Cinema?) rumors have reached a fever pitch in recent days thanks to several disclosures and leaks by third parties privy to late-stage prototypes of the device, speculation has mounted as to which variant of OS X it will run — will it be an iPhone (ARM CPU, iPhone OS) or a Mac (Intel processor, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard)?

The most difficult part of answering this question, for even the most well-informed and -connected of insiders, is that Apple has explored both possibilities and has been extensively revamping countless elements of the Snow Leopard interface to make multi-touch input more practical. One way or another, Macs will eventually adopt multi-touch displays; it’s just a matter of when and what models, at what price ranges. Read more

Weighing it at twice the size — 1.3GB vs 655MB — of the previous 10A394 build (itself the first major post-WWDC seed update), Snow Leopard 10A402 has been seeded to developers via Software Update from within the beta-stage Mac OS X 10.6. As usual, Apple’s seed notes were short on details….but reader & source reports have already begun to reach our inboxes and the early reviews are very positive.

Snow Leopard build 10A402 was released with typically minimal fanfare or detail in the seed notes which read only: “This Snow Leopard Developer Preview Update is recommended for all users running the Snow Leopard Developer Preview Build 10A394 or later. This update includes general operating system fixes for stability, compatibility, and security.”

However, within minutes of the update being posted to Snow Leopard’s Software Update, reports began to flow in rapidly from developers and others who are running these latest Mac OS X 10.6 test builds — now in early beta phase following last month’s World Wide Developer Conference where the landmark 10A380 build, essentially a feature freeze and beginning of debugging in earnest, was released. Read more

Today Apple released Snow Leopard developer seed 10A394 through the Software Update system. This is the first Snow Leopard seed to be released in an “update” form through Software Update rather than as a complete separate build from the Apple Developer Connection website.

The download weighs in at 655MB, and requires that build 10A380 already be installed. Apple claims the new build contains the old standby of “general operating system fixes for stability, compatibility and security”, and users are reporting that the new Dock Exposé feature works now.

Rumors’ own beta/nightly-build aficionados and the usual suspects on the grapevine will be spending extensive hands-on time with Mac OS X 10.6 build 10a394 in the hours and days ahead; expect further related posts both on our web site and via our Twitter feed (@MacOSRumors) as information becomes available to us. Read more

Though many readers have reported the problems with Safari 4.x on Leopard, few of the same issues were reproducible by testers/developers and sources who have hands-on access to the latest post-WWDC builds (10a380 and later) of Snow Leopard.

We’ve noted the considerable boost to Safari 4 performance that users of Mac OS X 10.6 build 10a380 have experienced in previous posts to our Twitter feed, and it would appear that a similar difference applies to many of the stability problems readers have been reporting with 10.5.x, even after the recent Safari 4.0.1 Update is applied.

In fact, in several cases, it would appear that v4.0.1 actually made some of these issues worse. Paradoxically, though the 4.0.1 Update package is not available for Snow Leopard (requires 10.5.7) and 10.6 is still almost three months away from release with plenty of system-level bugs left to be fixed, virtually all testers we talked to were left scratching their heads in surprise when attempts were made to reproduce the widely reported crashes/misbehavior on 10a380 or more recent builds. Read more

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Last Updated: 3:15 EDT(newest updates at the bottom) — Live Coverage is now complete. This is an archive of our postings as of 3:15 PM; more can be found in other posts here on Rumors or by following us on Twitter.

From our Twitter feed: Several readers at the Moscone Center have noted that banners there show the iCal logo w/ the date June 19th…a release date?

Also noted by many attendees on the banners is a new Quicktime X logo. Read more

As Rumors has previously reported, we expect an entirely new family of iDevices to be shipping by the end of the summer — and although expectations for an announcement of new 2009 iPhones are running high today, the actual shipping date of those new phones is most likely at least a few (3-4?) weeks in the future.

We also believe that at least one other group of iDevices, most probably and expanded/upgraded iPod Touch lineup, will be announced today….with at least some models paralleling the feature set of the high-end 2009 iPhone, including:

*One proposed marketing name for the new iDevices was “iPhone/iPod Touch X2,” denoting the “twice as fast, twice as much, twice the features” advancements over 2007/2008 models….

In the case of iPhone OS 3.0, we already have a fairly good idea of its feature set, performance, and reliability from the series of developer betas that have been released over the past several months. Although Apple has not yet made an official statement as to its final release date, there has been none of the hedging that we’ve seen with Snow Leopard; we wouldn’t be surprised to discover that some type of delay, or a “Final Beta” similar to Snow Leopard’s, will be announced today….but the most likely outcome is a release in the near term if not actually today.

Obviously, we’re very excited about that and we know all of you are as well. If we’re forced to wait for one more round of debugging to be carried out and for developers to test their apps against a set of new features, we’ll live…but many things about the dev process thus far, and the state of the mobile operating system itself, suggest that a release is imminent without significant further delay. Read more

Some have speculated, based on varying degrees of “insider” information, that all iDevices (current 2007/2008 iPhones & iPod Touch models as well as upcoming 2009 iPhones, iPod Touch models and an all-new iDevice sometimes referred to as ‘iTablet,’ ‘iPad’ or ‘iPortal’ which will compete with Tablets and “Netbooks”) running iPhone OS 3.0 when it ships this summer may have more than just the “background notification” features announced at the iPhone OS 3.0 Preview Event in March.

Specifically, several rumor-mongers have suggested that certain apps — either a specified number (two [2] is the most frequently mentioned figure), or a limited range of application types which would fit certain requirements to be “pre-approved” for background-tasking capability by Apple’s AppStore managers.

Neither of these fits very well with Infinite Loop’s style, nor are they consistent in any way with the information we’ve received from our own “insider” sources. Read more

Despite being a mere 21 builds apart from the previous seed, 10A314, released earlier this month….the latest Snow Leopard seed (simultaneously released in both Standard and Server versions) has definitely taken a big step forward in many areas.

Several elements of the full internal Mac OS X 10.6 code tree, such as the “Marble” interface revamp and overhauled Finder as well as the entire PowerPC version of the operating system, continue to be withheld from the developer builds — but even absent those more visible features, Snow Leopard is truly beginning to shine and show full potential with the advent of 10A335.

Performance is a notable area of big improvement since build 314 was released at the beginning of April; already stunningly fast, sources confirm that 335 removes a significant amount of debug code which always bogs down developmental versions of OS X as compared to their final-release counterparts. Read more

Despite the previous build of Mac OS X 10.5.7 code-name “Juno” appearing nearly ready for release within days (it’s now been over a week), Apple has delivered a new seed — build 9J56 — to developers, and it looks like a little bit of work still remains before we’ll see 10.5.7 in Software Update.

From Apple’s build notes on 9J56, the following headline changes were highlighted for developers to test against:

Fixed an issue when a process is killed or crashes while using AFP

Bluetooth compatibility and stability fixes

Crash reports missing application’s short version info fix

Crash log file missing machine’s name fix

Fixed an issue with Personal File Sharing where an AFP volume was not a valid Time Machine backup disk

Although these seem relatively minor, set against the full “Juno” project changelist which is nearly 200 items long at this point (and doesn’t include subtle tweaks of relatively little interest to third party developers for whom the change logs are written)….of particular note is the focus on Bluetooth in this build. Read more

As nearly everyone notes right from the start when they begin to dig into the numbers that Infinite Loop has disclosed, the company’s profits — up 15% overall — have been driven primarily by strong sales & margins in the iPhone sector of its business.

That is to be expected, and will continue to be the case; however, in about seven weeks’ time (WWDC, June 8-12th) we are increasingly confident that more than just new iPhones & iPods will be announced. Whether the new iDevice(s) will be Apple’s answer to the netbook, the “iTablet,” or both in one device…whether they will be marketed as a Mac, given an i-Name, or one of each….these are the questions that we’ll be digging into over the coming days. Read more